Wolters Kluwer Health
may email you for journal alerts and information, but is committed
to maintaining your privacy and will not share your personal information without
your express consent. For more information, please refer to our Privacy Policy.

Purpose: A complexity science view implies that essential managerial strategies for high-performing health care organizations include meaningful conversations, enhanced relationships, and a learning culture. These three dimensions informed our approach to studying huddles. We explore new theories for how and why huddles have been useful in health care organizations.

Findings: We identify theoretical paths that could link huddles to improvement in patient safety outcomes. Huddles create time and space for conversations, enhance relationships, and strengthen a culture of safety. Huddles can be of particular value to health care organizations seeking or sustaining high reliability.

Practice Implications: Achieving high reliability, the organizational capacity to deliver what is intended to be delivered every time is difficult in complex systems. Managers have potential to create conditions from which huddle outcomes that support high reliability are more likely to emerge. Huddles support efforts to improve patient safety when they afford opportunities for heedful interactions to take place among individuals caring for patients and embed mindfulness into the organization.

Shannon M. Provost, MBA, is PhD Student, Department of Information, Risk, & Operations Management, McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin. E-mail: shannon.provost@phd.mccombs.utexas.edu.

Holly J. Lanham, PhD, MBA, is Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Information, Risk, & Operations Management, McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin.

Reuben R. McDaniel Jr., EdD, is Charles and Elizabeth Prothro Regents Chair in Health Care Management, McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin.

Jacqueline Pugh, MD, is Research Professor of Medicine, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and Acting Associate Chief of Staff for Research, South Texas Veterans Health Care System.

The research reported here was supported by the Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration, Health Services Research and Development Service (CDA 07-022). Investigator salary support is provided through this funding and through the South Texas VeteransHealth Care System. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The authors have disclosed that they have no significant relationship with, or financial interest in, any commercial companies pertaining to this article.